


Poetry in Numbers

by truethingsproved



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M, student/teacher relationship but only kinda she's not his student anymore, ugh i just love her so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-16
Updated: 2013-10-16
Packaged: 2017-12-29 13:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1006173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/truethingsproved/pseuds/truethingsproved
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vanessa is beautiful in that striking way that makes people stop on the street and tell her so, and she’s a certifiable genius and she’s going to write the greatest novel of the new world, if she can just afford to finish her degree. She smiles at the photographers and she feels like she’s on top of the world when they tell her to pop her hip out just so, yes, hand right there, now look right at me—breathtaking, Miss Rossi, absolutely breathtaking.</p><p>When she goes home she sits down at her desk with a mug of hot chocolate and a smile that lets her forget that outside the walls of her flat the world is breaking, crumbling into a chaos that words can’t collect and shape, and she writes about a darkness so deep it swallows the monsters at their door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Poetry in Numbers

The world is ending but people still need underwear. The first time Vanessa Rossi is photographed wearing nothing but a lace bra and matching panties she wonders, briefly, if she should feel degraded, but the only thing she feels is the warm glow of satisfaction in the pit of her stomach when she remembers that this modeling job means that she’s able to pay her tuition.

Vanessa is beautiful in that striking way that makes people stop on the street and tell her so, and she’s a certifiable genius and she’s going to write the greatest novel of the new world, if she can just afford to finish her degree. She smiles at the photographers and she feels like she’s on top of the world when they tell her to pop her hip out just so, yes, hand right there, now look right at me—breathtaking, Miss Rossi, absolutely breathtaking.

When she goes home she sits down at her desk with a mug of hot chocolate and a smile that lets her forget that outside the walls of her flat the world is breaking, crumbling into a chaos that words can’t collect and shape, and she writes about a darkness so deep it swallows the monsters at their door.

———

Dr. Gottlieb is famous at the university, and not just because he’s brilliant, not just because he’s terrifying when he wants to be, not just because he can silence and entire class of twenty-somethings with nothing more than the narrowing of his eyes. He’s famous because he’s never had a single student fail his classes, no matter how difficult—famous because no matter how much his students hate math going in to his classes, they come out with a love for numbers etched into their bones.

The first time Vanessa fails a quiz in his class is the only time Vanessa fails anything. She sits inside his office for an hour and a half, and he goes over every single equation she doesn’t understand, patiently at first but with a growing fervor that makes her smile. He loves numbers the way Vanessa wants someone to love her someday. “I don’t understand this” is greeted with excitement, and the only thing Vanessa imagines he could ever love so much as numbers is teaching.

He asks her what she’s majoring in and she tells him creative writing. “Find poetry in numbers,” he suggests, and after that they become a cadence, a song, and she only needs to connect them.

He hands back her next quiz with a smile and her score is one of the best in the class.

———

Vanessa graduates with half a novel written, three unfinished plays, and more photoshoots than she would have dreamed under her belt. She’s been countesses and vagabonds and scientists and queens and angels and demons and monsters and goddesses, a thousand people she could only imagine and a thousand people she wants to write. She graduates with the fourth highest marks of her class and she writes a speech, one she delivers with all the confidence of the queens on the glossy magazine pages delivered to her door every month with her name emblazoned forever beside the images.

"I had to learn to balance what I loved with what was real," she says, and her voice rings with authority. She catches Dr. Gottlieb’s eye in the crowd and she smiles; he smiles back, his hands folded over his cane. "I had to learn to balance fantasy with the terrible reality outside. I had to learn to find the poetry in numbers.

"The world has become terrible, and cruel, and dark, but there’s so much to be found still there. There’s poetry in this tidal wave of destruction and in that poetry there’s hope. It’s written in the very makeup of creation, in the numbers and the letters that build the world." Her eyes are fixed on her professor’s when she adds, on a whim, "Those numbers are the handwriting of God."

When he gives her her diploma she shakes his hand and, on a whim, she hugs him. He’s startled by the contact but he doesn’t shoo her away, only smiles and presses her hand with his when she releases him.

"Write to me," he suggests, and she shakes her head.

"I’ll write  _for_  you,” she promises instead.

———

One year, four months, and sixteen days pass and Vanessa trashes her novel—sets it on fire, with a pile of printed pages in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other as she feeds her words to the flames roaring in her little fireplace, a veritable inferno devouring a little piece of her soul she doesn’t want anymore. She writes poems instead, and publishes a few in a local literary magazine.  _I am become Death,_  she thinks mournfully as she burns the last page of her unfinished novel,  _and I have consumed a universe._

She writes a poem about that, something maudlin and eloquent that she sends to the magazine that night.

There are piles on her desk, her bookcase, her coffee table, every flat surface. Books she hasn’t finished reading, magazines with her photographs in them, magazines with her poems and the one short murder mystery she wrote when she was nineteen, and letters.

There are, of course, the stack of received letters, from her friends from college and, more frequently, Dr. Gottlieb. He’s being published, and if it’s quite alright with her, he’d love to get her input on the way he’s written the introduction—it’s lacking a certain flow, wouldn’t she agree? The semester-long sabbatical in Vienna has made him utterly despise music for the time being and if he hears that blasted Moonlight Sonata  _one more time…_  He’s been reading her poems and they’re quite good, but he doesn’t understand what she means by this line, and would she mind explaining?

She writes back letters that are bursting with details, from the taste of the air to the way she’s always preferred Mendelssohn to Mozart, though she’s never really been able to love anything more than she loves Gloomy Sunday.  _That’s rather morbid,_  he writes back, and she smiles at his words and pinches the bridge of her nose and says “stop” out loud to herself.

The biggest pile of letters is the unsent letters. Most of them, too, are to Hermann Gottlieb, her muse.  _I can’t begin to explain how glad I am that you read my poetry,_  reads one letter, the handwriting cramped and rushed.  _You’ve inspired most of it._

_I wonder at the hollow and cavernous echo in my bones and realize it’s simply that I miss you terribly. I wish I’d taken more of your classes._

_I think I’m falling in love with you, Dr. Gottlieb, and the way you look at numbers like they hold the secrets of the world._

She adds another letter to that pile and instead sends him something mundane, ends it with  _Yours, Vanessa_  and pretends that the taste of the envelope’s glue on her tongue doesn’t make her feel despondent when she realizes how many words he’ll never read, words like  _I’m in love with an idea of you from almost a year and a half ago, an idea of brilliance and kindness and a wry twist of your mouth when you recognized my voice in the classroom, and I would do just about anything to see you again if only to be sure it’s you I’m in love with and not an image of you I’ve manufactured._

Her wish comes true in October and he’s wearing a burgundy scarf around his neck and his knuckles are white from his grip on his cane. He calls out to her—“Miss Rossi!”—and she knows then that she’s in love with him, and she wonders how she went so long without seeing it.

———

That evening Vanessa Rossi starts a new novel, one about finding love in the dust left behind by the apocalypse, and she scraps the beginning four times before finding an opening sentence that speaks to her. She stops pretending it’s not Dr. Gottlieb’s face she imagines as she writes. She stops pretending she’s ever wanted to write for anyone else so badly. She stops pretending she’s ever wanted someone to be proud of her as much as she wants him to be proud.

———

A thousand years ago she’d have invited him for coffee, asked him how he’d been, suggested that they catch up, but the simple fact is that coffee,  _real_ coffee, is just too expensive. Instead, they walk together, tucked into winter clothes, their breath visible in the chill of the air. He asks her how the writing is going and she changes the subject, like she always does. They meet like this once a week—he’s still teaching, but he’s been cutting back. The PPDC has been sending him reports, asking him to take a look, and there’s a certain shine in his eyes when he talks about it, like he’s found another set of numbers with which he can fall in love.

"If anyone can save the world, it’s you," she tells him honestly, one day as the snow is first starting to fall. He doesn’t seem to hear her—instead, he watches the snow as it falls, catching in her hair, her eyelashes, fluttering to rest on the curve of her cheek before melting away entirely.

He focuses his eyes on hers again and he smiles. “Thank you, Miss Rossi, but I think the world is past saving.” He looks at her with a sudden curiosity, his brow furrowed, and he says, “Maybe we should just find a new one.”

"That might be easier said than done," she laughs, and he shakes his head, the corners of his mouth turning up.

"Write me a new world," he suggests. "I wouldn’t want to live in one created by anyone else."

Eight hundred and forty-seven words becomes six thousand, three hundred and twelve before Vanessa’s able to sleep that night but she knows she has her novel now, she knows that she’s reached what she needs.

 _For H.G.,_  she writes on her brown paper napkin, stained with rings of instant coffee and hot chocolate from the bottom of the mug she keeps setting there. As if it hasn’t all been for him.

———

Winter is slow and deep and beautiful, even when the world crashes around you and burns into nothingness. She goes to see Dr. Gottlieb and surprises him, sitting in on one of his classes, and though he doesn’t say anything he smiles so widely he actually falls silent for a moment. He waits until the end of the class to speak to her, when she comes up to the front of the room with a small parcel wrapped in brown paper tucked under her arm.

"Merry Christmas," she tells him, and he shakes his head, holding his hand out to stop her.

"I was hoping I’d see you again before Christmas," he says. "Give it to me then, and I’ll give you yours."

She smiles, nods, pretends she isn’t flushing, pretends she can’t see his smile mirroring hers, doesn’t dare to hope. Hope is a dangerous and fragile thing and she refuses to let herself become its prey. There is nothing in her to appeal to him, the failed novelist who tries to find poetry in numbers, but sometimes she imagines that he finds her beautiful in all the ways she finds herself beautiful, and more, and it makes her heart skip a beat or two and there’s a fluttering in her throat when she says his name.

———

True to his word, Dr. Gottlieb comes to see her at her messy, tiny little flat, and Vanessa smiles the way she did the first time she understood those numbers he taught her and she steps aside to let him into her home. It feels intimate, almost, the way he looks around as if trying to memorize her walls and the way she looks within them.

His gift to her is a journal, bound in leather like books used to be, with smooth white pages that are practically begging to be written on, to be marked as hers. Impulsively, she breathes in the scent of the pages and the smell of a time she’d almost forgotten floods back to her.

Her gift to him is her novel. The first draft is finished now, and she knows it’s flawed, knows it needs work, but she doesn’t want anyone else to see it until he’s read it. She’s tucked the napkin in there, with her scribbled note, and he seems so taken aback by the dedication that he simply stares at her.

She kisses him impulsively, a brush of lips against his cheek, and she draws back as soon as she realizes what she’s done. “I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice quiet, and she makes to stand as a look of realization comes over Hermann’s face. For such a brilliant man it’s certainly taken him long enough to understand. 

He looks at her curiously, and he’s not looking at her like she’s a number, like she’s the handwriting of god, he’s looking at her like she’s better, even, than that. “I wish you wouldn’t be,” he replies, his voice so soft she can barely hear it, and when he leans forward and presses his lips firmly against hers she opens her mouth to his in a rush of warm breath.

"If you let me, I will fall in love with you," he tells her when he pulls away, his cheeks flushed and his lips parted, and she thinks to herself  _I already have._

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back and I'm back with PacRim fic!
> 
> Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!
> 
> Anyway, forever thank you to Gamble and Elaine and Simon for reading this oh wow you guys are my sunshine <3
> 
> feel free to drop by my blog (allisonnargentt.tumblr.com) to shout at me or say hello, friends are super fun and I like having them.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


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